One of the exhibits at the Memorial and Museum at Auschwitz Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, is a room of human hair. The room has an odd purplish tint to it, cast by the climate- and light-control systems that slow the hair’s decay.
A display case holds two tons of human hair from an estimated forty thousand people.
“Please do not photograph the room of hair,” Pawel Sawicki, a press officer of the museum and my group’s guide, told us. “We don’t know exactly when it will all turn to dust.”
Photographing the hair might hasten its disintegration. But also, the museum balks at letting patrons take pictures of human remains; a crematorium on the grounds of Auschwitz I, one of three Auschwitz camps in the Oswiecim area, where seventy thousand corpses were burned, is also off-limits to cameras. Still, many take pictures.
Crowds gather in front of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate in waves, photographing it almost synchronously, because you can’t not take a picture of it. Some people pose under it and have their companions take their pictures. A few people take selfies. It’s weird.
Where does the impulse to take a picture of the entrance to a place of horror come from? Because hardly anyone took pictures when it was happening? As evidence that you have visited?
Instagrams from Auschwitz - The Awl
via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1nEN7Hb June 14, 2014 at 11:40PM
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